Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know about

He's been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.

Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That's the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina state Senate.

David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War, calls him a "swashbuckling figure who wouldn't take sass from Northern or Southern or Black or white, Union or Confederate."